“Proper
names are never translated” seems to be a rule deeply rooted in many people’s
minds. Yet looking at translated texts we find that translators do all
sorts of things with proper names: non-translation, non-translation that leads to a different pronunciation in the target
language, transcription or transliteration from non-Latin alphabets, morphological
adaptation to the target language, cultural adaptation, substitution,
and so on. It is interesting to note, moreover, that translators do not
always use the same techniques with all the proper names of a particular
text they are translating.

Unlike generic nouns, proper names are
mono-referential, but they are by no means mono-functional. Their main function
is to identify an individual referent. It has often been claimed that proper
names lack descriptive meaning:

"An ordinary personal name is, roughly,
a word, used referring, of which the use is not
dictated by any descriptive meaning the word may have. (Strawson 1971:
23)"

In the real world, proper names may be non-descriptive,
but they are obviously not non-informative: If we are familiar with the culture
in question, a proper name can tell us whether the referent is a female or male
person (Alice – Bill), maybe even about their age
or their geographical origin within the same language community or from another
country, a pet (there are “typical” names for dogs, cats, horses, canaries,
etc., like Pussy or Fury),
a place (Mount Everest), etc. Such indicators may
lead us astray in real life, but they can be assumed to be intentional in
fiction. Titles and forms of address can also be problematic in translation.
The translation of proper names has often been considered as a simple automatic
process of transference from one language into another, due to the view that proper
names are mere labels used to identify a person or a thing. This is exactly
what Vendler purports when he writes that “proper names have no meaning (in the
sense of ‘sense’ and not of ‘reference’), which is borne out by the fact that
they do not require translation into another language” (Vendler1975:117).

In his view, proper names are to be treated as labels,
which are attached to persons or objects and the only task of the translator
is to carry them over, or transfer them, from the source language text
to the target language text.

Basically the same is maintained by Sciarone, who
argues, in a much similar vein, that the view that proper names have no meaning
(from the point of view of the language system) is corroborated by the general
practice of leaving them unchanged in translation (Sciarone 1967:86). It has
been shown, however, by authors like Searle (1975) or Strawson (1975) that this
view is mistaken: proper names, beyond their identifying function, may also
carry ‘senses’. The fallacy of this view thus lies in the incorrectness of the
background assumption: not all proper names are mere identifying labels
– in fact, most of them turning out to carry meaning of one sort or another.
This will entail, then, that the translation of proper names is not a trivial
issue but, on the contrary, may involve a rather delicate decision-making
process, requiring on the part of the translator careful consideration of the
meanings the name has before deciding how best to render it in the target
language.

Basically, nouns are classified as common or proper. Common nouns
refer to a class of entities (e.g. squirrel), while proper nouns have a
unique referent (John, London).

Grammatically, proper nouns behave very much in the same way in the
sentence as common nouns. There are, however, well-known co-occurrence
restrictions that distinguish them from common nouns. The most important among
them are:

Proper nouns (PN) do
not accept demonstrative pronouns as determiners. One would not normally
say this John just bought a car. However, supposing there are
several Johns out of whom you wish to single out a particular one, you are
already using John as a common noun meaning 'any person called John.'

PNs do not accept
restrictive adjectives or restrictive relative clauses. In the sentence the
Old Shakespearefelt the closeness of his death one is
implicitly comparing one of several manifestations in time of the person
called Shakespeare with the rest, therefore, one is using the word as a
common noun in the grammatical sense. The same applies to sentences such
as she is no longer the Eve she used to be. One may deny this only
at the price of more or less ad hoc explanations about the
character of the noun in question. Another way of putting this would be to
say that we have to do with two homonymous words John or Shakespeare
respectively, one of which is a proper noun, the other a common noun. When
in a given speech situation we have a unique reference, we are dealing
with a proper noun, otherwise with a common noun.

Opposition between
definite and indefinite is neutralized in PNs (a given PN either
invariably takes zero articles as in John, London, or
invariably takes the definite article as in the Strand, the
Haymarket, and the Queen Elizabeth). A seeming counterexample
such as that is not the John I was talking about is an instance of John
being used as a common noun as seen above. In other words, a noun's status
as either common or proper is ultimately determined by situational
factors. If in a given speech situation, there is a possibility of what
looks like a proper noun having multiple referents (this John, two
Johns) we have to do with a common noun homonymous with a proper noun.

All of the above features derive directly from the fact that PNs
refer to unique referents. In Randolph was a true Churchill the
surname is being used in the sense 'a member of the Churchill family', that is,
as a common noun.

Whether a given noun is common or proper is not always easy to
decide. There are borderline cases that could be classified either way. Also, a
given noun may change category depending on how it is used. For instance, a
common noun referring to a given landscape feature may turn into a proper noun
with a unique referent. Examples include names such as Saari 'island', Kymi
'large river' etc.

Personal proper names used metaphorically may turn into common
names: He thinkshe is a Napoleon. On the other hand, surnames
such as Smith, Fletcher and Seppä 'smith' have their
origin in the trade of the first bearer or rather that of the father of the
first bearer. Proper names (used here interchangeably with the expression
'proper nouns') can be dealt with in a number of ways in translations. First, a
PN can be transported wholesale from the target text (allowance being made for
possible transliteration or transcription depending on the languages
concerned). Second, it can be partly transported from the source language (SL)
and partly translated. Thirdly, it can be replaced with more or less different
names in the target language (TL). Finally, it can be dispensed with
altogether.

In a relevance-theoretic framework, the meaning of a concept
is made up of a truth-functional logical entry, which may be empty,
partially filled or fully definitional and an encyclopaedic entry,
containing various kinds of (propositional and non-propositional) representational
information about the denotation and, as I understand it, possible connotations
of the concept (e.g., cultural or personal beliefs), stored in memory.
The concept may also be associated with a lexicalentry,
which contains linguistic (phonological, morphological, semantic and categorial)
information about the natural language item related to it (Sperber and
Wilson 1986:83–93). The three different types of information (lexical,
logical and encyclopedic) are stored in different places in memory. It
is suggested that the content of an assumption, defined as a structured
set of concepts, is the function of the logical entries of the concepts
that it contains and the context in which it is processed is, at least
partly, drawn from the encyclopedic entries of these concepts (Sperber
and Wilson 1986:89).

Prototypical proper names (that is, names
without a descriptive content) are handled by associating with them empty
logical entries. In other (less prototypical) cases a name may also have a
logical entry (or, in the case of a composite name, it may include several
logical entries which combine to make up the logical content of the name) which
is partly or fully definitional (Sperber and Wilson 1986:91–2). Thus proper
names seem to be not essentially unlike any other kinds of expression in terms
of the structure of their meaning. Rather, what we find here is a continuum of
various sorts of proper names. At one end of the scale we find the most
prototypical names, proper nouns, which supposedly lack any logical content but
may carry several assumptions in their encyclopedic entries. At the other
extreme we have composite names, which are no different in terms of logical
content from any ordinary phrasal expression. What makes them names,
eventually, is that they are used as such in the given context. Names of
countries seldom pose a problem to the translator. There are lists of the
official names of countries in Persian and English that should be consulted. In
a few cases, variation does occur depending on the degree of formality
involved. The basic rule concerning personal names is that they are left
untranslated. In some cases, transliteration or transcription may be needed
depending on the language. There are however, exceptions to this basic rule. A
trivial one is that in certain languages (Chinese and Japanese, for instance)
the order of a person's first and last name is the opposite to the most common
Western order of first name + last name. In Europe, Hungarian last names come
before first names. Names of musicals, operas and ballets are sometimes
retained in translation. My Fair Lady, West Side Story and Così
fan tutte are known all over the world by the original names, a notable
exception being Russia, where only translated name are used. Names of
international organizations normally have translation equivalents in the member
countries. Looking at the number of translation errors actually occurring in
texts, a more frequent problem is that of the translator not paying attention
to transliteration rules.

In spite of the “translation rule” quoted above, there are no rules
for the translation of proper names. In non-fictional texts, it seems to be a
convention to use the target-culture eponyms of a source-culture name, if there
is one, but if a translator prefers to use the source-culture form, nobody will
mind as long as it is clear what place the name refers to. Perhaps the audience
will think that the translator is showing off her knowledge too much. Wherever
the function of the proper name is limited to identifying an individual
referent, the main criterion for translation will be to make this identifying
function work for the target audience.

In fiction, things are not quite as simple as that. We have assumed
that in fictional texts there is no name that has no informative function at
all, however subtle it may be. If this information is explicit, as in a
descriptive name, it can be translated – although a translation may interfere
with the function of culture marker. If the information is implicit, however,
or if the marker function has priority over the informative function of the
proper name, this aspect will be lost in the translation, unless the translator
decides to compensate for the loss by providing the information in the context.
Of course, there are proper names that exist in the same form both in the
source and the target culture.

Names of towns, municipalities and villages
are examples of settlement names. There is no problem with names of relatively
unimportant settlements that are carried over unchanged in translation. The
town of Rauma does not change its name, nor does London, Ontario. With smaller places, however, a gloss is often in place to give the reader
an indication of the type of place concerned. To sum up, PNs can be treated in
a number of ways in translation:

They can be imported
unchanged from the SL text;

They can be modified to
fit the phonological/graphological system of the TL. This, of course, is
something that has or has not been done for the translator by his/her
speech community in the case of conventional place names like Prague,
the Hague, Rome etc.;

They can be expanded
with a gloss to make up for the TL reader's lack of world knowledge in the
target culture;

On occasion, they might
be omitted altogether (perhaps replaced with a paraphrase) if considered
peripheral in terms of the central message of the text or if retaining
them would be more likely to cause the reader to pause in puzzlement.
True, this would be more likely to happen in interpretation, but could not
be ruled out altogether in translation, either;

In rare cases, they
might even be introduced in the TL text where, instead of a proper name,
the SL text contains a cultural allusion unlikely to be understood by the
TL reader.